Google has a patent for "Pedestrian Glue," designed to keep pedestrians from falling under the vehicle if they are hit by a self-driving car. The patent describes an adhesive layer that "may be a very sticky material and operate in a manner similar to flypaper, or double-sided duct tape," designed to prevent pedestrians from further injury, the San Jose Mercury News reports. The technology, which will also work on ordinary cars, will bring both the vehicle and the pedestrian to a "more gradual stop than if the pedestrian bounces off the vehicle," the patent states. The sticky stuff will be under an eggshell-like layer so it won't end up covered in insects during everyday vehicle use. The idea sounds like it has the potential to prevent injuries, American Physical Society spokeswoman Rebecca Thompson tells Gizmodo.

If a giant robotic arm swooped in to destroy your home, you would probably be pretty angry. So it is hardly surprising that an octopus living off the Canadian coast in the Pacific Ocean jumped to the defence of the coil of cable it had been living under when a robot came to take it away. A video captured while the underwater robot tried to carry out maintenance work, shows the cephalopod playing tug of war with the robotic arm. The dispute was filmed by Nautilus Live while engineers were using a submarine's robotic arm to repair a cable which was part of the Ocean Networks Canada underwater observatory. Sadly, the fight was only going to end one way, and despite the octopuses valiant efforts to protect its home by hanging onto cord holding the cable coil together, it ultimately lost.

An entire sector of the federal government is held hostage by the last century. The death spiral of the gas tax, and the other broken user-fees, demand we reform federal transportation funding, harness emerging technology, and guide the autonomous vehicle revolution. The powerful disruptive force of car sharing services like Uber and Lyft will rapidly be joined by autonomous vehicle technology. A huge part of our economy and culture--the American way of life designed around the automobile for the last century--will change. Our challenge is to use that change to solve problems rather than create new ones, and maintain and tailor our existing infrastructure for the future.

Google I/O was full of announcements about upcoming products and enhancements. We're in a seminal moment, said Google chief executive (CEO) Sundar Pichai kicking off the company's annual I/O Conference in San Francisco. Looking back at the past 17(!?) years, Pichai discussed Google's evolution to the live audience of 7,000. As technology gets more sophisticated, he sees artificial intelligence (AI) playing a huge role in the company's next 17 years. "Leveraging our state-of-the-art capabilities in machine learning and AI, we truly want to take the next step in being more assistive to our user. Today, we are announcing the Google Assistant," said Pichai, one of the only people in the world who's allowed to use the "L" word on Search Engine Watch.

Josh Newlan wrote a small piece of software he calls "Say What" that listens to meetings for him and alerts him if his name is called. Newlan works for Splunk, a U.S.-based machine data company, but he lives in Shanghai. "I end up having lots of early [and] late calls with the U.S. office ... hence the need for this tool," he told CNNMoney. Newlan's python script starts to run when a meeting begins and his computer's microphone listens in the background. It uses an open source speech recognition program to recognize phrases based on the silences between people's sentences.

In a previous post I advised data scientists in training to build stuff. This post gets more specific. Here's what I mean when I say I'm doing data science. The raw stuff of data science is a collection of numbers and names. Measurements, prices, dates, times, products, titles, actions--everything is fair game. You can use images, text, audio, video and other complex data too, as long as you have a way to reduce it to numbers and names.

AN ALARMING app that can scan a person's face and identify who they are and what they are into has become very popular in Russia. This is the opposite of great, and represents a threat to privacy that has staggered even The Guardian newspaper, which has reported that the FindFace app is very accurate and can even be used to recognise whole crowds. It is the sort of thing that we might have expected to report alongside words like'Snowden' and'National Security Agency', but actually it's a consumer thing that draws on Vkontakte, the Russian equivalent of Facebook, to match mugs with, well, mugs. "In the short time since the launch, FindFace has amassed 500,000 users and processed nearly three million searches," said a report in The Guardian. "Some have sounded the alarm about the potentially disturbing implications. Already the app has been used by a St Petersburg photographer to snap and identify people on the city's metro, as well as by online vigilantes to uncover the social media profiles of female porn actors and harass them."

Clutter is a special challenge for robots, but new Carnegie Mellon University software is helping robots cope, whether they're beating a path across the Moon or grabbing a milk jug from the back of the refrigerator. The software not only helped a robot deal efficiently with clutter, it surprisingly revealed the robot's creativity in solving problems. "It was exploiting sort of superhuman capabilities," Siddhartha Srinivasa, associate professor of robotics, said of his lab's two-armed mobile robot, the Home Exploring Robot Butler, or HERB. "The robot's wrist has a 270-degree range, which led to behaviors we didn't expect. In one case, the robot used the crook of its arm to cradle an object to be moved.

IBM's voice-recognition AI ROSS,' powered by the Watson supercomputer, has just landed a position at New York law firm Baker & Hostetler handling the firm's bankruptcy practice.

Google yesterday confirmed rumors that it has been working on a custom chip designed to speed up computing related to its artificial intelligence efforts. The result, it said at its I/O developer conference, is a chip it calls a Tensor Processing Unit. It's designed to work with TensorFlow, an open source software library for developing AI applications. The TPU chips, Google says, are designed to be built into its existing computing infrastructure and are already in use boosting the performance of services like Street View and voice recognition. They also played a part in Google's AlphaGo software that defeated the human champion at the board game Go.